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So, it’s been a few days since I got back from my trip to London. It was only my second trip back since I moved here and as with the previous trip it was a rollercoaster of emotions… a really predictable one at that. Anyway, before the trip I was raring to get back to London – see my parents, see my friends, go to China Town etc etc…. I get there and I’m like “meh, it’s London, nothing different compared to Tokyo right…” – as before, it took me a few days to get back into the spirit of being a Londoner and as soon as I did, I really did not want to leave! Catching up with friends, drinking at the local watering hole, eating Chinese… seriously amazing! Anyway, I fly back to Japan and as soon as I land I start noticing all these annoying little things about the country; All these small things that I had “gotten used to” over the past year just came blaring back at me. Things like in the baggage hall, the constant repetitive PA telling people to fill out their customs forms… the constant repetitive voices of the ground staff reminding us to check the baggage tags to make sure the bags are ours… on tv it’s the constant loudness! I think this country does not know when to shut up.

Anyway, to summarise, I had a fantastic time in London and I keep wishing I had the same atmosphere and social network in Tokyo. Admittedly, that would be difficult considering my history here is eclipsed by that of London. Good friends don’t just appear and great friends are an even rarer thing. Yeah, I think that’s the main thing. It’s not so much I love London, I mean I really do, but it’s more the people I know there.

F1

Actually, today I was watching the F1 Japanese grandprix, it was an exciting race and I enjoyed watching it except for the stupid commentary. The constant reference to Toyota being on their home turf, Button being in his second home (his gf is half Japanese), the Japanese driver that finished last… soo much “patriotism” or what I would just categorise as misplaced enthusiasm. F1 is about the driver not the nationality on his passport. I really don’t care about the driver in last place, and I would prefer referring to the 2nd place as Trulli and not Toyota… it was afterall him in the driver seat.

Signs

Weird thing happened in London. Over the short period I was there… including the short hop to Belgium with my parents… I saw 3 newlywed couples still in their wedding gear… all happy and lovey-dovey. On the gangway to the plane home, HSBC had their usual advertising posters – this time it had photos of marriage with some slogan next to them.

Seriously, disturbing if this was meant to be a sign. If it was, then at least point in the the right direction. You need two people in a wedding! … also, I’m not planning on getting married that near in the future!

Reboot

So, back in Tokyo. I feel I need to reboot my life here. As one of my friends pointed out, I need to be less negative… although that wasn’t exactly referring to my life… time to fight

I’ve been thinking about my ideal lifestyle lately – or more accurately, what I wish I could be doing every other week or so.

• Cinema: Back in the UK I regularly went to a see a film – Orange Wednesdays and so forth. Since coming over here, I have been to the cinema just once.
• Guys’ Night Out: It would nice to go to a quiet bar with a close friend and just talk about guys stuff
• Road Trip: Hire a car, go driving through those winding roads? Stop off at look out point, sit on the hillside and chill out…
• Weekend Trip: A domestic or NJA trip. See more of this beautiful country and continent

Things like the cinema and the chilling out and chatting at a bar/cafe would be something I’d like to do week in week out. The guy’s night out doesn’t really have to be guys only, I think I just feel that it’d be nice to take some time out of my hectic life to just sit and chat.

Romantically or just with friends the road tripping and weekend trip have the same aim really… to make new memories.

I knew what today was; I’d been reluctantly counting down the days ever since we hit September. Up to that point it was aiming for that one year landmark of my career. I managed to get through most of the day without making a big deal about it. However, then it all went pear shaped.

Drinks, parties, celebrations? Why would I want to celebrate this. That fateful day turned my whole world upside down. I hate that slogan… but then again, I realised today that it was the biggest shock of my life. I have no regrets choosing the path of leaving on a jet plane and not knowing when I’d head back again. However, so much changed on that day, so much.

No time to settle in, no time to make my mark, the clocked stopped that day. When will it start again?

Ok, I am still employed, I have new friends, I have work and responsibilities, I am experiencing a once in an era event first hand… a clash of cultures, etc, etc, blah blah blah…

Reality is cruel and depressing.

Today is Election Day. I, along with the rest of the country world predict a landslide victory for the opposition party, meaning the end of the LDP’s grasp on Japanese government for the past 50 odd years. Personally, I have minimal or less than minimal knowledge of politics, and despite my best efforts over the years to pick up some basic understanding (taking Politics classes for a year / reading the paper / participating in low level conversations on the subjecct), I still have no clue.

Anyway, today was the very first time in my life that I participated in an election. Up to this point, I have not been an eligble registered voter in the countries I have lived in. Admittedly, there was the regional election earlier this year that I did not participate in… but this it the national election!! Some might wonder why someone who has difficulty remembering which party the Prime Minister belongs to, is allowed to vote. One thing I do know is that, borrowing a catchphrase from another electoral campaign, “We want change”. Japan has had 4 Prime Ministers in past few years, each one worse than the one before… we need another Koizumi-esque person with character, charisma, and most important of all, the ability to fix stuff.

So, I went to the polling station, which was like 5 minutes away. I wasn’t too sure what to expect, but I was somewhat surprised at the low-tech nature of it all. Apart from the barcoded paper that was delivered by post to identify each one of us, everything else was hand written. I mean, no proof of identify required, just saying “yes, that’s my name”… then, it was writing the name of your candidate on a piece of paper… followed by checking a couple more boxes for other positions (which I didn’t really understand). Where was the barcoded or electronically readable voting forms? Good luck to whoever has to read my handwriting!

Influenza

In other news, swinging back to Monday. The guy sitting next to me looked seriously ill on Monday, coughing and spluttering everywhere. Thankfully he got a mask by mid-morning, which eased my tension… but by mid-afternoon I hightailed it out of there and headed to the other office to complete my work day. Anyway, he took the next day off which was a relief, but he returned on Wednesday to torture me again.

I’m not sure if it was him or some other factor but by the end of the week, I was feeling pretty rough. To be honest, I was feeling rough on Monday. [ I should have taken my manager's advice and headed home on that day ... ] Thursday, I had a scheduled day of, and I felt refreshed after that…. returning to work on Friday – eugh, again.

Anyway, finally the weekend and some relief… but, it’s funny… the whole week I’d been on the verge of being sick – as soon as the weekend hits, so does the full on being sick thing. Ok, not exactly sick…just a slight temperature and a major chest infection and throat swelling. I pretty much slept from 6pm to this morning on and off… my voice is sort of back and at least I can breathe easier but I have half a day to fix this before work tomorrow T_T.

It ain’t influenza thankfully, but it ain’t something I like having…

License

So, in an eventfull week… I got my driver’s license!! After 7 odd years of pissing about and never actually taking the test, on Thursday (my day off), I got the actual card!

It all started back in the UK, before university even… I started taking lessons, practicing with my dad, etc etc… then uni came and screwed up my whole schedule… having to cancel the driving test because of exams… and then deciding I didn’t need a license in London…

Coming to Japan, a few things made me realise I needed a license – 1. the fact that I had put it off so long and I had no reason to anymore, 2. I needed a pastime of sorts, 3. one time when I spoke with my granddad, he mentioned it as one of the things that a guy needs – (something like: money, education, driver’s license) … I think this was the material list… I think we also had talks about the immaterial list like compassion, etc etc… but I’m getting off track.

So I took up driving lessons in Japan too. After dillydalling around in Japan too… trying not to take too many days off – trying not to fail the test too many times – and also taking “required” courses like First Aid, etc… I got my license! woooo~~~!

You know, I’ve been so used to not driving, it seems strange to think that I can sit in the driving seat / rent-a-car / plan road trips etc…

hmm, where to? who with… Now, that’s a very good question.

Sometimes 140 characters aren’t quite enough to express that momentary feeling or thought.

You know, watching tv, isn’t as mind sapping as people think, sometimes your mind can go places! How to know what someone else is thinking?

Anyway, I need to be a little more forward, a little more proactive, a little more fight! As the guy on the screen jsut said “it’s not a bad thing to fight and have that gap between the real you and the one you want to be…” or something like that anyway :p

erm yeah, ok, apparently tv is bad for your brain… I can’t think of what the point of this blog entry was…

BBQで上司に説教されて、あの時は全然気にしてなかったんだけど、the more I think about it, the more I wonder… what the hell am I doing? Where is my life going?

I know my blog entries tend to centre around the same topics over and over again. I understand how boring and dull my life must seem to you all. I wish I could write about something more interesting. I wish I could be more positive.

I like to think I used to be an outgoing, happy kid… but to be honest, that happy self probably went into hibernation a long long time ago. 最近は本当に楽しいって思ったのは何度も歩けど、正直those happy times are so shortlived, it scares me. The moment, we 解散, all that happiness slips aways って感じ。超情けないな。

These moments of fragility are so frequent these days, it seriously adds to the never-ending stresses that I seem to create for myself. It’s a vicious circle.

In my life, I like to think that I have priorities… family, friends, work, etc, etc… but then, sometimes I think, what the hell is the point of having priorities if they don’t make me happy. Seriously, I can’t explain this.

Does being a 社会人 mean that conversation revolves around work, weekend plans, romantic happenings (if any), vacation plans… ok, I have no idea what other conversation there is, but life feels a little stale recently. I think I need a little more excitement… nothing crazy, but to be honest, I think I need something that really gets my heart racing.

You know, sometimes when you have that feeling of wanting to let your frustration out by punching something? or maybe, screaming at the top of your voice. The feeling of being trapped in this shell, self created or imposed by the environment I’m in, it’s tiring.

Honestly, I do not regret for a single minute the decision to come over here. I just want to be able to show that my life is just as great, if not better, than everybody that remained in London. At the moment, the only reason for my life being better is, I’m in Tokyo, you lot aren’t. But seriously, that’s shallow… The screaming I want to do… I don’t want it to be about frustration, stresses, etc.. I want it to be about my fantastic life… the awesome things I’m doing…

I’d hoped the past week would kick start something, change something… all the events I went to, all the people I met up with, everything… and nothing. Meeting up with new friends, friends from work, uni friends, old friends from 5-10 years ago…. all of it was fantastic! I really did enjoy seeing everyone. Catching up, shooting the breeze, whatever. I hate to say this, but I want more.

Unsatisfactory.

In Other News

In other news, I bought a new laptop. After 5 years of serving me extremely well, my laptop finally died. Over the years, I’ve made some adjustments like, adding new RAM, remapping my keyboard to work around broken keys, putting up with a dodgy sound system, living with an extremely noisy, most likely loose, fan…. and the final straw… the screen losing all brightness – not completely dark but, so dark that you can just about see the outline of a window.

Anyway, I bought the new studio xps 13. It’s snazzy, yes. But I still miss my old laptop. I mean, after 5 years, I had it set up near perfectly. Shortcuts, applications, settings, etc. I have to redo all of that.

I previously spoke up having near everything backed up online. Admittedly, I started that as I forsaw the day that my laptop would die. However, getting my new laptop I was faced with a difficult choice. After near 4 years working, studying and living on Ubuntu… was I going to install it on my new laptop or not? I mean, study is no more – work is at work, and living? well, living is just the internet, email and the occasional editing of some document. I don’t play games on my laptop these days… programming is mainly limited to work… I’m going to try migrating back to Windows. A heavily modified Windows environment obviously. Trying to integrate as much of the best features of linux into Windows is going to a mighty difficult task, but it’s a challenge I’m going to attempt to tackle. To be honest, being such a new computer, I reckon Ubuntu would still have a few quirks it would need to sort out… plus, the latest release has been full of bugs. In a few months time, either I would have successfully migrated to the cloud, or I’ll be installing the next release of Ubuntu, or maybe 7?

Either way, it looks like it’ll take me a few weeks to get used to this new machine.

Anyway, to all the geeks out there, I’d just like to say…

svn-ing your entire computer has its challenges and is frustrating at times, but it can be worthwhile. Admittedly, it’s near impossible to have compatibility with Windows and Linux on the same repository, plus, I have yet to successfully test this out across multiple machines, but it’s a lot easier than the stupid network drive set up. The damn thing keeps losing connection every time I try to bloody copy a large file and it’s too damn laggy to stream media off!

Finally…

I’m currently in the middle of watching the Robocop: Prime Directives mini tv series. It’s メチャ懐かしい！ I think I’m turning to the past more and more often these days…. so not good.

In similar news… I was talking with a friend about actresses that are our types… we couldn’t really name any recent ones *shock* we realised that we’re old enough to have lived through more than one ‘era’ … are we from the Bullock, Kidman, Aniston, Ryan, Roberts era? Does that era include Portman, Johannson, Jolie, etc? Either way, to have lived through more than one era for anything, be it movies, tv series, politics, music… that is a scary thought!

I had a bit of a shopping spree last week. Kind of retail therapy but not really, as it wasn’t very theraputic… I bought 4 new games:

1. No More Heroes (Wii)
2. Wii Sport Resort (Wii)
3. Pikmin 2 (Wii)
4. InFamous (PS3)

I have yet to play anything other than 1. but I’m really looking forward to inviting some friends round to test out the Motion Plus thing on Resort. Will most likely blog about it once I do. But yeah, No More Heroes is turning out to be pretty interesting.. will review that too soon!

Anyway, last words…

Who the hell reads my blog these days anyway?

I haven’t written anything in a while. Life has been more than a little hectic the past few weeks and for a variety of reasons, I haven’t had done a full weeks worth of work for the past few weeks.

Anyway, self and family are paramount and thankfully I work under an extremely understanding boss. Times like this, hopefully infrequent, do provide an ideal opportunity for reflection.

The next few weeks, months and years will no doubt define the rest of my life; that’s been true for a while. However, paraphrasing a well known quote, it’s not how you fall, it’s how you land that’s important. These hurdles set surrounding me need to be overcome and priorities need to be reorganised. Though, despite all that, I feel that what was important previously are not unimportant… but need to be looked at in a different light. I still want to excel at work. Learn more, experience more, be more. Also, what needs to be done – just get it done. What needs to be said – just say it. Expectations need to be surpassed.

The fragility of life is reflected in the fragility of emotion, the fragility of self. But, life can also be strength. Time to reflect that…

Although recent events has seen a shift towards a more interaction with the “locals”, despite living in this country, I spend the majority of my time isolated from its people.

I’ve realised that this has had one major drawback. After the initial rapid improvement of my communication skills, I’ve hit a dead-end. We had to do some goal setting earlier this month – I decided that it’d be a good idea to improve my business level Japanese. I think that’s going to be quite a challenge considering I have a massive tendency to fumble my words whilst speaking Japanese. I was telling my friends yesterday that “just as I was getting ready to leave, a colleague spoke to me”… I got the first bit of the sentence out but totally screwed up on the second, and only managed to get my point across after a long pause. This is not good.

Practice really is a major force in keeping things ticking over… everything from sports to just speaking. Time to practice!

My first week back from vacation has passed without any major events.

Considering the apprehension I felt last weekend, and the whole “let’s do something” attitude, I ended up slipping back into my life without remorse. Don’t get me wrong, I still have all those delusions of grandeur swirling through my mind – travelling the world, doing volunteer work, going to the gym, etc… but somehow it’s just far too easy to put all of that on the back-burner.

Statement: Last night I drank a lot. It’s been a while since I drank so much – I mean, I can’t say it’s been a while since I drank, but it’s definitely been a good period of time since I really wanted to drink so much. I’m wondering what that shot I had was? I remember it being incredibly tasty with no bite.

Anyway, it was a “Charity” party, but from my point of view, it looked more like just a party at a bar as there seemed to be minimal charity appeal. I had these visions of expanding my social network, but as always, the reality of it is that that didn’t really happen! I mean, I met a lot of people but I doubt that it had any long-term affect on my network at all. Sucks slightly. Don’t get me wrong though, I had a fantastic time and it has definitely been a while since I’ve been invited to such a party – a charity function or not. Hopefully I’m not wasting away all these opportunities by being so reserved.

This past week, I’ve been on a mission to streamline stuff, specifically my computer; as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m backing up all my data as regularly as possible – with the thought of my computer dying hanging over me – plus, cutting out as much crap installed on my computer. Hmm, I don’t really have much else to say on this topic. I did look into how I could blog post without going through a browser and using a text editor instead… but that went nowhere.

I was asked yesterday who I missed the most during my vacation. I let the question slide by making a stupid comment but having thought about it – wading through memories of last week, I don’t really know to be honest. Well, to be honest, it was only a week and I had my phone on me so I wasn’t exactly out of touch.

Hmm, anyway, my stomach is grumbling so I think I’ll wrap this up for now.

I have returned from a fantastic vacation in the heart of SE Asia, away from the stresses of “modern life”. The time away from my “regular” routine has given me time to reflect on what’s important in life. The region I travelled through is well known for the widespread poverty. However, seeing and experiencing the locals living through each day with such energy and enjoyment made me realise that poverty does not mean a poor standard of living.

We in “the West” may have got used to computers, chocolate and convenience stores, but we tend to forget that those things are “luxuries”. The trip reminded me that one should really be grateful with the roof over our heads, the food on the table and the clothes on our backs… the only other ingredient in a fulfilling life would be “purpose”.

I was explaining to one of the locals the intricacies of my job; standing in the middle of a rice field in the heart of Cambodia, the whole conversation felt incredibly surreal.

Anyway, it made me wonder about my “purpose” in life – I’ve written entries about “ambition” and “dreams” before, and I think this follows a similar vein. We all have to set goals in life and strive to improve ourselves. I feel, purpose gives us the energy to wake up in the morning and provides the foundations of happiness. I guess “purpose” may not be the right word to describe it, but the combination of ambition, optimism and purpose is essential.

Having realised the shortfalls of our modern society – in my life, as well, as well as those people stuck in poverty – I started wondering what I could do. I mean, I’ve never believed that one man can change the world, but I do firmly believe that one man can make a difference. I think maybe on my next travels, I’d like to try out some volunteer work just to see if my mind is in line with my body. It is easier said than done. Actions speak louder than words. I can throw any idiom at this thought but the truth is, I have no idea what it’d be like until I give it a go. I also know that my conscience has been stirred and I know that I will have to make every effort to not let it slip back into “routine”.

Some people say that seeing the world can change you. I myself have even spoken those words on many an occasion. However, up until now, despite all my travels, I hadn’t truly felt I’d changed. Sometimes I’ve wondered what my place is in this world. Now I know that I can’t just wait for it to find me a place. The people I have crossed paths with over the past week or so, have given me great strength and determination to drive forward.

Despite the tough times we are all going through right now, I hope that each and every one of us can look back on these years with fond memories; I hope that I can look back on this period and say “yes, I stood up”. The world may be crumbling all around us, but it’s not how you fall that matters, it’s how you stand. ….hmm, not that I’ve been crumbling or anything.

I feel I have so much more to say, so much more to share. But, maybe it’s one of those things that you just have to experience yourself. I really do love travelling.